


Like Petals Pressed in Sheets

by JJ_Shinnick



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Implied Child Abuse, M/M, Pale, Pale Romance, but it's only sort of intentional, off-screen violence, sort-of self harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-02
Updated: 2013-07-02
Packaged: 2017-12-16 20:09:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/866113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JJ_Shinnick/pseuds/JJ_Shinnick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave copes.  (No really, he doesn't.)<br/>Karkat doesn't notice. (No really...)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Petals Pressed in Sheets

**Author's Note:**

> Love to my betas, SemperJuris and Amnual. This sat on my hard drive for nearly two months before I figured out how to get to the end, short as it is. Rating is for off-screen violence and implied child abuse.

Karkat finds you on a day in your second year—you aren't sure which one. There's no sun to track days with, no clocks, just the slow progression of the dream bubbles to mark the passage of time. You often find each other this way, stumbling around the asteroid that has, for the most part, become utterly familiar to all. Insomniac wandering will do that to a guy, and you suspect you know the place even slightly better than most.

You're in one of the basements. Technically it's all basement but this room feels like it, bare metal walls and a smooth might-be-concrete floor. You've dragged in piles of alchemized pillows and blankets and are sitting on one of them like a throne. The room was lit by the same fluorescent strips as the rest of the place before you broke them, and now the only source of light is from a view screen set into one wall. The screen is broken too, or at least stuck on what you think is the troll equivalent of the blue screen of death. Karkat pokes his head in the door, sees you, and comes over.

“Hey.” You've never quite gotten used to him being civil. You nod back, not in the mood to use your voice. There's a reason you're down here in the dark, even on this ship of the dead. Karkat pulls together another pile of blankets and sprawls out on it, as though you are old friends, as though you've known each other long enough that you don't need to talk. You consider informing him that this is not the case, that he should really speak up or get out, but all that comes from your lips is a very thin sigh.

“So I was wondering something,” Karkat says, somehow unpacking everything that you didn't say in that brief sound. He waits.

“mmm?” you ask eventually, when it becomes clear he's waiting for a response. You're too tired for real words. You can't remember the last time you slept.

“I think something might be wrong with Rose.” A lesser man might have gestured for him to go on. You are not a lesser man. He looks nervous, though, you're learning to read him well enough to tell which shade of 'angry' would be worried on anyone else's face. “I can't smell her blood.”

That... okay, that cracks you, and you smirk at Karkat through the dark. You're pretty sure he can see you anyway. It isn't that dark—you're still wearing your shades, and you can see. Troll eyes are supposed to be pretty good for darkness anyway.

“That's normal for humans,” you tell him. 

“But I can smell yours!” You still. It would be nearly invisible to most people, as you haven't exactly been moving around much anyway, but this has a different quality. This is the stillness you learn trying not to aggravate an injury, and Karkat, damn his eyes, notices. “That's not normal, is it?” he asks. “What the fuck.”

“No,” you tell him. “Well, it's normal for me, but not for humans generally.” Karkat turns to look at you, his eyes flashing in the light from the view screen. He sniffs audibly, and for once it's clearly for information rather than effect.

“You have fresh wounds,” Karkat says, and it's not a question. “Where the fuck did you get fresh wounds? Have you been fighting?” You look at your hands, at the fingerless gloves you're wearing. They're an old pair of your brother's and looking at them just makes you angry again. Angry at him for the legacy of damage you can't seem to stop even now. Angry at yourself because he's gone and it's your fault. “What are you so pissed off about?” Karkat asks, and you realize he can smell that, too. Your reaction to that is more complicated and you seize on it, anything to pull you out of that black pit of loathing.

“Maybe I'm just black for you,” you joke, though it comes out deadpan serious even to your ears. “You keep accusing me of hitting on you, maybe you're right.” Karkat tends to take people seriously, even when he shouldn't. Maybe he'll let you skate by.

“Yeah, right.” Karkat snorts. “I may be a nookstain of a fearless leader, but I would have noticed that. We're not even on the shipping chart, idiot.” He pulls himself off the pile and comes to stand in front of you, studying you. “Where?” he asks, and you consider pretending not to know what he means for the ten seconds it takes him to get fed up and grab your hand. You hide the wince with the ease of long practice, but he's rough—you feel the scab on the back of your hand re-open where it's only just stopped bleeding from your run-in with a window that startled you. You see his nostrils flair and even you can smell the sudden tang of blood in the air.

“Who have you been fighting?” Karkat asks, more growl in his voice than you're used to—the trolls really have a very different range of sounds than humans do, more complex equipment. You don't answer him, and Karkat starts peeling off your gloves to get a look at the damage. He's muttering the whole time. “I would have noticed if it were a troll, at least I hope would have, not that shitting useless.... ah, fuck.”

You haven't been treating anything, so your hands are swollen as he works the gloves off. That's only appropriate, though. They're a pair of your brother's, and look what happened to him. Spent his whole life raising you to be strong and when push came to shove you weren't strong enough to save him—weren't even there at the right time, Knight of fucking Time. You'd lived weeks or months in a few days for the others, and you'd never found an answer to that.

“These don't look so good,” Karkat tells you when he finally has the gloves off, and it's so controlled, and that's so wrong coming from him. You glance down and he's right, the scrapes an ugly mottled yellow where the scabs have kept rubbing off, all on top of the blue-purple-green of bruises in several shades of healing. And some of them are bleeding again.

“Who?” Karkat asks again, growling still. He sounds less human every time he asks.

“Myself,” you say, and know you could do that if you wanted to, set up a time loop, but it wouldn't be satisfying and you're not sure you'd be able to punch yourself back as hard as you deserve. Karkat looks at your hands and then your face.

“No seriously, who?!”

“The fucking walls!” You shout back, suddenly unable to contain the anger that has become as constant for you as breathing. “The windows, the screens, anything that gets in my way. I'm supposed to be fighting him, I spent my whole life fighting him, but he's not here.” You try to suck in a breath but you feel like you've been gut-punched and the air snags all the way down. Karkat's watching you, and you'd swear that's fucking pity, and you don't have to take that from him so you punch him too, bare-knuckled and desperate.

And Karkat just takes it, just goes with it and picks himself up and wraps your bleeding hands gently up in his. He's careful with his nails; it barely hurts.

“I'm sorry,” he says, very quietly. “Sometimes you lose people. It fucking sucks. I don't think it ever does get easier.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” You ask. Your voice sounds like you've been crying, your eyes are hot and wet, but unless Karkat says something you aren't crying. You can't be. Your brother trained you out of that years ago.

“Shit if I know,” Karkat says. “But you're alive. They aren't. You have to fucking get on with your shit, because nothing you can do is going to fucking change that.” The words are soft but so intense you find yourself meeting his eyes through the shades, and you realize that his aren't just the soft gray they look at a distance, but have a thin band of red around the edge. It's almost the same color as yours.

“Shit,” you say, and draw what feels like your first breath in months. “Shit.” Karkat keeps your hands in one of his and uses the other to cup your cheek, something Rose would call an 'intimate gesture' but right now it just feels like safety, like being understood, and you lean into it the way you've been leaning into the cold press of dented walls. “Shit,” you say one more time, and Karkat shushes you gently. It's not a sound a human can make, a huff of breath with a bit of a hum beneath it. Like a cricket's chirp.

Karkat does release you eventually, but you don't go far and neither does he. He digs around in his sylladex until he comes up with bandages and antiseptic, and you're glad he's gotten so much better at using that thing. You all have. It was a matter of survival. You hold out your hands for him and he douses them with alcohol, and it burns but you let it. It's supposed to. It's a clean hurt, after all this time. When that's done he wraps your knuckles in the bandage. Soft, white, clean cloth. You don't think the gloves will fit over the bandage but he presses it down and they do, hiding it like a secret between the two of you.

“Terezi will have noticed too,” he tells you, after the gloves are fastened again and you've both pulled back to proper friendly distance. “She may not figure out what she's noticed yet, but she will eventually.”

“All of you guys have good enough noses to suss it,” you say, and shrug. “I'll worry about it when it happens. Just... don't tell Rose. She wouldn't like it.” You know this to be a pretty massive understatement, and Karkat probably does too, but he just nods.

“I won't tell.” He stands up, carefully, and just looks at you for what feels like a very long time. You look away after a minute, but it doesn't matter because you know he can't see your eyes.

“And Dave? Pale is on the shipping chart.” But he's out the door and down the hall before what he's said registers. You wind up sitting there in the dark for a very long time, running a gentle finger over your gloved hands.


End file.
